John R. Commons is without doubt one of the few reformers of the earlier century whose significant works are nonetheless actively learn, whose principles are nonetheless debated, and whose ideas are nonetheless utilized to the research of latest difficulties. His lifestyles spanned the years of America’s “Great Transformation,” from a state of shopkeepers, farmers, and small cities to 1 of big organisations, landless employees, and crowded towns. He grew to become concerned about virtually each element of America’s reaction to the dangerous unwanted side effects of that transformation.

A Worker’s Economist starts off with John Commons’ youth and schooling and maintains via his lifestyles as a pupil, instructor, administrator, and reformer. Commons’ record of accomplishments are nice in quantity and total impression. He labored at the employees of the 1st govt fee to enquire the industrial and social results of company mergers. He served as a public consultant at the fee that investigated commercial violence and place of work family members. He used to be a player observer in America’s greatest and such a lot ancient mineworkers’ strike. He wrote and administered the nation’s first constitutional employee reimbursement legislations. He built rules of social reform and public management that his scholars carried into the layout and management of the Social safety process in addition to Lyndon B. Johnson’s struggle on Poverty.

John Dennis Chasse reports Commons’ significant works, describes the folk with whom he labored, and follows the fortunes of the unions that have been intrinsic to his imaginative and prescient of “collective democracy.” As a last testomony to Commons’ significance, Chasse considers his legacy because it endures within the paintings of his scholars and beyond.